Hot swap drive on a HP Proliant DL380 G4

Tangfastic

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Jan 13, 2013
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Hi all,

My wife and I have been volunteerting at the local church and one of the charities that it supports. Anyway, I have been helping them with some web development and some pc support but have a question about their one (and only!) server.

They managed to procure a second-hand HP Proliant DL380 G4 a couple of years ago, which works well. I was in today and was having a look and noticed that one of the drives has an amber/red light on the third led which means the drive has failed (if I am correct). On looking around, they managed to procure 2 extra SCSI drives for the server (not attached, still boxed) and I was planning on 'hot-swapping' it today for them but have a couple of questions.

From the documents that the engineer who set it up wrote up, it seems that the 2 attached drives are in a RAID (I'm guessing RAID 1). Am I correct in thinking that I can simply hot-swap the drives and the RAID array software will start rebuilding the drive ? If so, am I correct in thinking that it's best to do this with the system up and running as if I shut the machine down, change it and then try and boot the RAID software will get confused and it won't boot ?

I should also say that the server is running Linux, and my knowledge of Linux doesn't extend to server rebuilds! :D

Thanks for any help. Kind regards.

Paul
 

That would be my approach, that is afterall the whole advantage to the hotswap configuration there.
Good luck
 

Tangfastic

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Jan 13, 2013
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10,510
Thanks for the reply, C12Friedman. I shall swing by on my way home from work on Tuesday evening to change. Fingers crossed I don't break the darned thing!

Many thanks once again.

Paul